Hi all!

I know that a lot of you write blogs, and most of the rest of you read blogs (and if you don’t, well, now you do!). I’ve become curious about people’s preferences regarding blog reading and writing, and so I’ve set up a survey asking about those preferences. I’d really appreciate it if you’d go through and give me your responses!

Edit: Yes, the survey is now closed. It was meant to be a quick snippet, not something long-running and comprehensive.

Thank you to everyone who participated (or tried to)!

So, hi.

I’ve been away for a while. Part of that is that I haven’t actually had a computer that runs WOW for a few weeks now. You can imagine how frustrating this is. The worst part is that what destroyed the computer wasn’t necessary (although, in hindsight, it probably would have destroyed itself anyway). You may read the story at the bottom if you like.

The other part is that I’ve been starting a business. My work in that area is in delighting website audiences and turning them into evangelists – basically, the things that make people say, “This is so cool – you’ve gotta try it out.” I’ve been focusing on small businesses and non-profits, but it occurred to me today that I could apply this work to WOW guilds as well. RP guilds want people who are going to be happy to log on and roleplay with them, so that nobody’s ever at a loss for someone to interact with. Raiding guilds want people who are excited about raiding with them, not just raiding in general, because that means that nobody’s going to bail 45 minutes before the raid saying “lol <Anal Blinkstrike> has beter loot sytsem”. (That’s if they say anything at all.) Social guilds want people who are going to actually socialize and not just sit around and raid the guild bank every now and again.

That’s my job. I can help you find and keep the guildies you want to have around, while quietly discouraging the players you don’t want. If you’re struggling with player retention, I can help. If you’re keeping the wrong kind of players, I can help with that too. I’ve run two guilds, assisted with two more, and been an active member of several beyond that – RP, social, and raiding. So I understand the dynamics that come into play and the special considerations that WOW guilds need.

If you’re interested, head over to Delight Specialist and check out the description. (It’s more general than this one!) Also, because I know the WOW guilds that don’t have a lot of money available often need help the most, I’ve arranged a special discount – if you’re arranging a consultation to help with a WOW guild, use the discount code DTPGUILD when you check out to bring the price of a one-hour consultation down to $25.

Now go kill Arthas for me – he’s got it coming. I just wish I could be there to see it.

The Story

My left speaker had started cutting out, but unplugging and replugging the cord almost always fixed it. I figured it was a problem with the rear audio jack, but when I assembled the computer I hadn’t realized that my case had a front audio jack and so I’d left those jumpers unconnected. So I went into the case to connect the front audio jack.

When I reassembled the case and turned it back on, nothing came up on the screen and the POST beeps indicated a video error. So I reseated the video card; no luck. I opened the case back up and re-seated everything, including the CPU, and that’s when I noticed the disaster – when I unseated the CPU, several pins fell off. They’d been corroded by something, which was visible both on the CPU and in the socket. (Oddly, nothing else on the board showed signs of damage.) Naturally, the CPU didn’t seat properly again.

So at minimum I need a new CPU and motherboard; I may need to replace pretty much everything. I know the RAM, the hard drive, and the CD drive are good, but beyond that everything’s up for grabs.

So, guys, while I love that my SEO is working, you’re all finding my blog because of things that I actually wrote about. That makes it hard for me to do “funny search terms” posts! I was looking forward to it because I haven’t done one in a while, but now you’ve gone and actually found what you were looking for. It hurts, guys. It really hurts. Not even Rosanna Arquette can soothe my troubled soul.

I guess I’ll work with what I’ve got.

• duct tape and a prayer – Yep, you’re here! Welcome. We have pie.
• discipline priest best in slot items – I don’t actually think I’ve done one for ICC gear, but BobTurkey has a good Disc priest Best-In-Slot list.
• greed vs disenchant – this is the post you’re looking for.
• disc meta gem – Ember Skyflare, Insightful Earthsiege, or Revitalizing Skyflare.
• priest t10 4 set bonus – it’s simpler than the old version, and not as fun for the more advanced players, but to less-skilled players it opens up another tier of gear.
• borrowed time and gcd – yes, Borrowed Time reduces the global cooldown, to a minimum of 1 second.
• haste for disc priest – we loves it. 433 is your soft cap; with Borrowed Time up, that’ll reduce your GCD to 1 second, which is (as above) the farthest it’ll go. You can make your spells faster than that, but if their cast time is 1.5 seconds or less, you won’t be able to cast more of them in the same amount of time.
• power word shield scale with spell power? – yes, PW:S gets 80.57% of your spell power applied to its absorption.

Edit: goddammit, I used the “desperately seeking” joke the last time I did a search-term round-up. I gotta get me some new material.

As you can see, I haven’t changed over to Heirlooms and a Prayer. Yes, it was a joke. But I’ve wanted to get the new blog theme up and running before I posted again, and for various reasons that’s taken longer than I thought it would, so it’s only today that I’ve been able to admit to the joke!

The funny thing is, I am actually going to be talking about more than Disc priesting here from now on; I really do have a bunch of non-priest alts at various levels and I’ve been playing them a lot, so I have a bunch to say about paladins and rogues in particular.

But the main point of this post is to point out the new blog theme! It’s based around an image that I commissioned from the lovely Baenhoof of my priest Theande. (If you’d like to commission work from Baen, now’s the time – she’s shutting down commissions once she reaches a total of 10 on her wait list!) This is a preliminary version; I’m not entirely sold on the colors and layout, but I like the basic idea. Let me know what you think in the comments!

According to the last poll, 75% of you wouldn’t pay for a WOW guide under any conditions, 12% would if the preview were good, 6% would if the guide’s author were authoritative, and 6% would if the author were authoritative and the preview were good. That’s about the mix I expected. Thank you!

New poll, because I’ve been thinking about which characters I’m going to drop in favor of worgen once the expansion drops. Right now I’m going with my warrior and my warlock; I would have done a worgen druid, but let’s face it, you’re not going to actually see worgen form, ever, if you’re a druid, so why not just work on the night elf druid I already have?

Anyway, now I want your opinions! Which classes are you going to roll once the expansion drops?

More… &raquo

Because I’m curious!

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If you are following me on Twitter, and if you have logged on at just the right times, you may be aware that my wife has started a business providing copywriting and consulting services to small businesses. She wants to work with bloggers, designers, and other creative types – especially people who run handcrafting businesses, of the type you’d find on Etsy.

At the moment, she’s running a holiday giveaway: she’s giving out two one-hour consulting sessions, where she’ll go over the presentation of your site and your web copy and help you figure out how to draw more readers and get the readers you do have to stick around more (and, if you’re selling something, to buy more of what you’re selling). There’s no obligation on your part – all you have to do is head over to this post and leave a comment, and you’re entered into the drawing. The deadline for entering is 11:59 PM EST this Saturday, so head over and leave a comment.

(It is possible that you are now saying “but Chris, what can a copywriter do for me?” I could respond in a number of ways, from listing generic benefits to actually going to your site and giving some pointers, but the bottom line is this: if you go comment on that post, it costs you nothing to find out what a copywriter can do for you!)

I’ve shuffled some things around on the server, and hopefully now the old etherjammer.com/wowblog/* links will redirect to ducttape.etherjammer.com/* . Specifically, this should mean that RSS readers using www.etherjammer.com/wowblog/feed should start updating again! If you’re still having trouble, please let me know below.

Originally published here on 4/6/2008.

Yesterday, I wrote up an quick-and-dirty guild roster for my World of Warcraft guild on Boulderfist. There’s no styling at all; it’s just “here, output this table”. But it works just like I want it to: there’s a back-end script that fetches the data from the Armory once every night and feeds it into a mySQL database, and then a front-end page that fetches the data from the mySQL database on demand.

I guess the next step is to style it up and add AJAX; I’ve already got all the data pulled from the database, and it’s not changing (except once a day at midnight), so why not save myself some database calls and have the page update dynamically?

The whole thing has been a nice refresher on PHP (I wrote a very basic roster in PHP a couple months ago, and yesterday’s project was actually built on that, which is why I didn’t just do it in Ruby on Rails, my pet language/framework at the moment) and on web programming. I should do stuff like this more often.